


Casting Onward

by TheWhiteLily



Series: Watson's Woes July Writing Prompts 2017 [8]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bravery is more than physical courage, Gen, Mental Health Issues, POV John Watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2017-07-10
Packaged: 2018-11-30 08:39:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11460006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWhiteLily/pseuds/TheWhiteLily
Summary: Because while a psychosomatic ailment can be overcome in a moment with the right stimulus, a mental health issue isn't actuallycuredby a moonlit chase across a rooftop.





	Casting Onward

**Author's Note:**

> JWP #9: I Never Get Your Limits. (A character's hidden talent saves the day. The talent, and the character, is up to you, as well as what constitutes 'saves the day'.)

Ella had been a terrible psychologist, according to Mycroft.

But it had occurred to John very early on that Mycroft, being naturally deficient in common empathy, was probably an even worse one.

Mycroft had his own particular expertise in the analysis of people, majoring in the things they were likely to do and how those things were likely to impact upon a) the government in which he operated as a minor official, and b) his baby brother. The softer irrelevancies didn’t really enter into his field of view.

He was right about John’s hand. Right about the battlefield. Right about walking with Sherlock Holmes.

And while he was right about the choices John was about to make, even though John should have known better, he’d been wrong about Ella. Because _she_ was right about the things that were wrong with John—and the things that could _actually_ make him better.

She was right. John knew that. She always had been.

About the blog, of course, once he’d found something worth blogging about. But about other things she’d wanted him to do; other ways she'd wanted him to process his emotions.

John had been… a difficult patient. Doctors often were. He wasn’t a doctor specialising in the mind, of course, but a general practitioner required expertise in spotting the sort of stresses that built up to explosive pressure—and the outlets those stresses might eventually find—to be able to treat the whole patient. Such expertise was particularly relevant to a doctor operating in a war zone.

He might not have trusted Ella; might not have been remotely capable of the kind of bravery that would have been required to bare the soul-destroying blankness and despair that had, at its worst, utterly consumed his mind from the inside. But John was more than capable of consulting the literature on the treatment plan she suggested, seeing the sense in it, and following it through.

It had even worked, once Sherlock had given him back the will to let it do so.

The blog. And the other things.

And on nights when the walls were closing in and Sherlock’s aggravated mutterings from his chemistry set hadn’t yet reached a level that implied imminent danger; when the misty chill of London ached in his shoulder but the dreams of desert heat and blood and gunfire took John far too far to be anything like relief… he would pull out the needles and bury himself for hours and hours in dull, repetitive tedium.

He hated it; hated the way it left his mind free to dwell and flit from horror to regret to lost opportunity to unknown fear, the pain rising up inside and choking him. But he needed to do it.

There was a reason John was addicted to adrenaline, and it was this: in a moment of crisis, there was no room left in his mind for anything else. With Sherlock in his life—vivid and extraordinary and _impossible_ , drawing every eye in the room with the swirling lines of his coat, filling every ear with the dark treacle of his voice, overwhelming John’s mind with brilliance and necessity and _wonder_  in a way that drowned out every other thought—it was much the same.

With Sherlock, John wouldn't have even needed the adrenaline to give him that brief, blessed moment of respite from the demons lurking in his mind.

But none of that made them go _away_.

They came back again in the silence of the night and, weeping against his pillow, shaking in his sleep, he would feel the terrors come on; the regrets; the bitter sorrows, the sourceless dread.

And, in the silence of the night, John would prop himself against the bedhead in the yellow lamplight, the bright patchwork comforter Mrs Hudson had pressed upon him drawn up over his knees, and he would pull out the needles. The ache in his breast swelled and peaked and ebbed and rose again as he forced himself on, one drab-coloured stitch after the other: counting, alternating, twisting, undoing and carefully, rhythmically, counting again.

Eventually, after the thoughts had finally stopped going around and around, he could sleep.

Eventually, after night after night running from sleep, but not (brave soldier that he was) from himself, he could join each piece together to make a whole; make something tangible take shape from the regiment of tortured thoughts that would never have left him alone merely because he so desperately wished them gone.

On those nights, it was though he had been, at last, purged of everything.

On those nights, when he finally slept once more, he didn’t dream.

* * *

“Hmmm,” said Sherlock, looking up from his microscope to eye John sharply across the table. “Interesting.”

John kept his grainy, red-rimmed eyes focused on his breakfast, and wondered how much Sherlock was seeing.

How much he was _not_ saying.

* * *

As John spent more and more time living with Sherlock, the colours grew brighter, the contrasts sharper, the patterns less complex, the discipline required to force himself on through the militarised routine less intense. The sleepless nights grew farther between, until John barely needed to bring out the needles anymore.

Sherlock used John’s laptop as if it were his own; John's phone as if he didn’t even own one. He insulted his blog, poisoned his food, rooted through his underwear, shot his gun at the walls, invaded his showers, stole his bedsheets to use as a wrapping for roadkill; he bullied him, took him for granted, drugged him and terrorised him, shocked him and amazed him.

But he seemed to understand, at least, without having to be told, that John’s jumpers were off-limits.

* * *

When Sherlock died, John’s fingers rubbed themselves raw from the abrasion of the salty wool as he tried and tried and _tried_ to move on.

Everything in the rough, dark colours that were all he could see turned out lumpy and misshapen, the wool refusing to pull evenly through his wet fingers, the effort required to count and alternate and cable through the despair almost too much to bear; but the determination to go on, the _desperation_ to make it work—somehow, no matter how impossible—had been even greater.

If there was just one thing that watching the suicide of his best friend had taught John, it was that he couldn’t, not _ever_ , place that burden on someone else.

And when Sherlock returned, John tossed and turned for nearly half the night before Mary had wordlessly got out of bed, to return with a pair of slender needles and a ball of gossamer-fine grey wool.

Without more than a sympathetic smile of acknowledgement, she pressed them into his hands, tucked herself back under the duvet, and apparently went to sleep.

John gritted his teeth, and cast on.

* * *

There were a lot of those nights left to come; not just for Sherlock and the things he’d done, the things he wouldn’t tell, but for Mary. The things she’d done. The things John knew she didn’t want to explain. The things he didn’t want her to either.  Most of all, for the suffocating feeling that he was slowly, quietly drowning within his own mind.

But he was okay. He was coping. He was fine. Until Mary died.

* * *

When _Mary_ died, John simply couldn’t—

Couldn’t face the—

 _Couldn’t_.

He left the needles in their bag where they belonged and did his best to drown out the pain with alcohol and denial and blind, undirected rage.

There were some things he wasn’t strong enough to look directly into.

Some things that he didn’t _deserve_ to have purged.

John knew it had to end badly, that the skin-deep coping, the distracting, the pretending, the compacting down, the _not feeling at all_ was only temporary. The pressure was rising, and the moment he couldn’t keep ahead of it anymore, something was going to explode.

Like this, he couldn’t risk having Rosie in the house with him. Couldn't feel her, even if she were in his arms.

Still, John couldn’t make himself care.

He couldn’t make himself care about anything.

Couldn’t—

 _Couldn’t_.

If he'd cared at all, he would have had to care about _everything_.

* * *

Then there was Sherlock, and Culverton Smith, and Sherlock and John, and then just Sherlock again. And then there was Mycroft and Mrs Hudson and the message from Mary, and Sherlock, Sherlock, _Sherlock_.

The man was like a tsunami battering at John’s walls: powerful and relentless at crashing through, releasing everything inside that John had locked away, everything inside that was too awful to face, too awful to bear, all of it dredged up and dragged forward into the light to where John couldn’t look away from the ugly truth of _himself_ anymore.

He _wasn't_ okay.

He wasn't.

But he looked.

And he was still here.

* * *

The day after Sherlock’s birthday, after there’d been cake and forgiveness and tears and arguments that weren’t really about Irene Adler at all, John brought Rosie with him to Baker Street for his shift at playing sober companion.

Sherlock, still exhausted and sick and sore from the withdrawal and the kidney failure and the cracked ribs, blinked at his goddaughter, rugged up as she was against the outside. He took in her pale pink knitted cap and jacket worked all around with tiny rosebuds and intricate woollen green leaves.

He turned those sharp eyes onto John, who, judging from the burning heaviness in his own eyes, probably looked as tired as he felt.

“Ah,” said Sherlock, and smiled. “You're back.”

**Author's Note:**

> This work inspired by my own battles with mental health. No, I do not knit. Words are my stitches.
> 
> All due credit to ancientreader's extraordinary [The Thing Which I Greatly Feared Has Come Upon Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10496052), which everyone should read because it is fantastic, and of which, while I was writing this, I kept thinking... damn, I hope I am not unintentionally and poorly plagarising aspects of this glorious work.


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